03 November 2004

That Old Time Religion

Review: Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ

For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to
condemn the world; but that the world throught him might be saved. He
that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is
condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only
begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come
into the world, and men loved the darkeness rather than light, because
their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light,
neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he
that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made
manifest, that they are wrought in God.
— John 3:16-21, KJV

The meaning in the message

Before we jump into a critique of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of
the Christ," a decent respect for people who are other than Christian
requires that we set the ground for the discussion by saying a few words
about the film's premise.

From the New Testament writers, through St. Augustine to the
present, Christian apologists (explainers) have used the narrative of
Genesis 3 to establish the necessity for God to "beget" a Son who can
bear God's Wrath against us for the Sin which we have inherited as a
result of Adam and Eve (the first humans) having eaten a piece of fruit
from the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" that God had forbidden
them. To the first Christian community, almost all of whom were Jews
familiar with Genesis, this made sense. But judging from the declining
membership in mainline churches, it doesn't make sense to many people
today.

Rather than scoff at the doctrine — and scoff one can,
starting with St. Augustine's argument that we inherit Adam's Sin
through our fathers' semen — let's try to extract its meaning by letting
go of Genesis and focussing on the Crucifixion itself. And though we
will only extract mere words, we ask that they may point to the Living
Truth whose silence answered Pilate when he asked, with haughty
cynicism, "What is Truth?"

Let's start with the barest outline of the Christian
narrative: God, the Creator of the Universe and everything in it, chose
to become born as an ordinary person, like you and me, named Y'shua
(whom we call Jesus) about 2000 years ago, as we reckon time, in Judea
(a remnant of the ancient kindgom of Israel, which in Jesus' time had
been annexed and occupied by the Roman Empire). At the same time, God
remained God, separate from Jesus, so that Jesus could only connect with
God through prayer, just like you and me. Ordinary people, like you and
me (many of the Judeans and their religious-political leaders), had
Jesus killed because his practices and his preaching threatened their
existence in three ways:

Jesus' laxity of ritual observance undermined
the purity of Judeans' system of beliefs and worship practices (the root
of both modern Judaism and Christianity). Many writings in their Hebrew
Bible (the Old Testament Scriptures) led them to believe that purity of
Religion was necessary to retain God's favor, which they believed
necessary to sustain them as a people, especially under the brutal heel
of Roman occupation.

Jesus' thinly veiled sedition against the Roman
occupation of Judea (His "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's:
render unto God that which is God's," would seem to indicate that he
thought Judeans owed their primary allegiance to something greater than
Caesar) threatened to ignite a new round of violent persecution by the
Romans. The Judeans had been exiled from their land once before — into
Babylon — and they were afraid the Romans would exile them again.
Indeed, the Romans coined the term Palestina (after the Philistines) in order to divorce the Judeans from their land by changing its name.

And finally, the Judean leaders were concerned
that Jesus would turn the subjugated (and angry) populace against them
for desecrating their Faith by collaborating with the Romans. Certainly
he seemed to demand a kind of "inner purity" that he accused them of not
practicing.

So, they did the prudent (and self-serving) thing. They handed
this charismatic, but dangerous kook over to the Roman authorities, who
routinely killed barbarians (non-Romans) by crucifixion, a method so
horrific, that no one depicted Christ on the Cross until about A.D. 400,
a century after the practice had been abolished and had passed from
living memory.

As for the Romans — they thought it only proper to kill any
overly religious Judean who might be taken to impugn the Divine Mandate
of Caesar to rule Judea or any other part of the whole world. As for the
Judean leaders and many of the Judeans themselves — their moral
compromise was in vain: within forty years, the Romans massacred the
Judeans and dispersed the survivors into the wider world. (Which set the
stage for Jewish and Christian sensibility to shape the mores of
Western Civilization to this day.)

But then, on the third day after his execution, people began
seeing Jesus alive, and having conversations with him in which they
walked with him, touched him, and ate food with him. Finally, after many
days he appeared to be taken upward into heaven.
These events transformed the followers of Jesus. They had been
humiliated, disillusioned, and terrorized by the brutal and
comtemptuous execution of their leader. But after the Resurrection, they
embraced death — both his and their own — and defiantly proclaimed his
teachings, his death by crucifixion, and his resurrection against all
authorities, despite all ridicule, and despite all hazards. And they
changed the world.

But first they had to explain the meaning of the events they
had witnessed. Which means they had to interpret these events using
words and images that would be understood by their audiences, both
Judean and Greco-Roman.

Now all explanation is simile and metaphor. One can only
explain the unfamiliar by likening it to something the novice already
knows and understands. All human language is a series of symbols, which
stand for things, or point to things, but are not the things themselves.
One is not going to capture the infinite God in a finite string of
words, even if that string is as long as the whole Bible. Nevertheless,
they had to explain, and, between forty and ninety years after the
events themselves, their explanations (which had become oral traditions
of several tiny and persecuted minorities) were written down as the four
Gospels familiar to us now. But even before the Gospels were written,
the gifted, educated, and driven Apostle Paul, wrote letters that
explained Christ in terms familiar to both the occupied and their
oppressors.

Though it seems inoffensive to us now, the reaction of anyone
who had seen a crucifixion to the Paul's declaration, "I knew only
Christ, and him crucified," would be shock. They would think him to be
an idiot. Yet many would listen for a while, in horrified fascination.

Jesus is indeed our Messiah, he would tell the Judeans,
because he conquered the greatest enemies of all, Death and Evil. He
came into this world precisely to submit himself to the worst they could
do, and then to triumph over them, on our behalf. And now that he has
triumphed, he will come back for every single one of us who will follow
him and lead us to Eternal Life with God — not some dim semi-existence
like the Judean Sheol, or the Greco-Roman Hades, but Eternal Bliss with
the Father, the Son, and the angels.

The Judeans would understand Jesus in terms of the sacrifice
of Abraham, and the lamb sacrificed at Passover, as being the sacrifice
to end all sacrifice. For the point of all sacrifice is to give up
something of value in order to make things right with God. Now God
himself has provided the highest value, his Son, just as God provided a
ram so that Abraham would not have to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.
God's Son, Jesus, is the stand-in for us all, for the debt we owe God,
because, on our own, we are not right with God. The Judeans would
understand this through the narrative of Genesis, in which Death and
hardship entered the world, because the first humans, Adam and Eve,
disobeyed the only commandment God had given them.

To the Romans, Jesus would be understandable as a tragic hero, who, like Hector in Homer's Iliad,
carried out his honorable duty, though the path of honorable duty was
doomed to a tragic and painful end. He would also be understandable as a
truth-teller, who, like Socrates, chose to die rather than to appease
respectable society by abandoning the truth. The Romans would understand
that we are not right with God by observing the evil and corruption
rampant in society. They were also familiar with Death and hardship
entering the world through an act of disobedience — Pandora opening
Epimetheus' box, against his order.

To either audience, the occupied or the oppressors, Paul and
the Apostles would preach that the crucifixion of Jesus had been
necessary, not for human purposes, but for God's purpose of redeeming
humankind from Sin (actually hamartia
which refers to a tragic flaw or a tragic mis-direction, in Greek, the
language in which the New Testament was written) and the consequence of
Sin — Death.

We, on the other hand, now know that hardship and Death were
in the world from the beginning of Life, long before there were humans.
Further, we know that evolution is the response of Life to hardship and
Death, and that humans are one of the expressions of that response. In
other words, God used hardship and Death to make humans. In response to
hardship and Death, we often disregard others and look out only for
ourselves. But, since we are evolved to be a social species, we know
that it is wrong for us to do so. We know that we must do good for
ourselves and our society, and that sometimes, we must sacrifice
our personal desires and interests for some higher good. We know that
this is what God's Justice has written on our hearts, yet we disobey,
and we lie to ourselves about it. And we attack those who threaten to
expose our lies — like Socrates, the Prophets, and Jesus. (Or anyone who
challenges our way of seeing the world and ourselves.)

We don't want to be confronted with our lies. Which means we
can't accept our true selves, and we don't believe anyone else can,
either, unless we pay the price, unless we earn acceptablity by
self-sacrifice to a higher cause. Yet we need to accept our true selves,
in order to be able to tolerate God, in whose presence we confront the
truth about everything. The price is beyond our ability to pay, for in
the presence of God, we have nothing to offer but tainted goods — the
selves that even we cannot accept. So God pays the price for us. God
came into the world as one of us, to endure abandonment by God, and to
be killed by us.

That is the price of admission for people like us into God's
Presence — Paradise. It is a shock, a horror, and a scandal. And since
we don't want to be confronted by the inference that we are that bad, we deny it, and attack (at least verbally) those who proclaim it.

Ecce Gibson

"The Passion of the Christ" opens with the camera moving at
night between tree trunks toward the sweating, trembling figure of Jesus
praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. "Oh my God, this is really Catholic,"
I think as I brace myself for a two-hour ordeal. James Cazviel portrays
spiritual distress so intense that it manifests itself in physical
agony even before Judas and the Sanhedrin's private guards arrive.
(Protestants discreetly emphasize the spiritual agony of the Passion,
while Catholics emphasize the physical suffering. Points to the
Catholics — we Protestants are often too prissy about embodiment. On the
other hand, most lay Catholics I know have never really thought much
about theology.)

We go on to see Jesus beaten and spat upon by the Sanhedrin's
guards, and then beaten, whipped, flayed, kicked, and crowned with
thorns by Pilate's Roman soldiers. We see him forced to carry his own
cross, which he embraces. We in the audience are relieved that his
torture is nearly over, but the worst is yet to come. Gibson forces us
to look as each nail is driven into Christ's sacred hands and feet.
Mother Mary watches, her hands clenched into the gravel on which she
kneels. I look down at my own hands, clenching the arms of my seat.

Other commentators have deplored this graphic depiction of
violence as excessive and offensive, unaware of what views they have
been spared. We do not see Jesus naked, even though the Romans commonly
humiliated their victims by exhibiting them without clothing. We do not
see Jesus raped, even though Roman soldiers had license to further
humiliate their captives by sexual abuse. (Perhaps Jesus was spared such
treatment, as he was spared the breaking of his bones, but the Gospels
and Catholic tradition are silent on this point.) Nor do we watch for
six or eight hours as Jesus hangs from the cross, the motion of each
involuntary gasp for breath causing such agony that he prays it to be
his last.

Other commentators take issue with some of Gibson's
portrayals, as do I. Pilate, for one, comes off far too sympathetically.
Roman writings by his contemporaries describe Pilate as being so
wantonly cruel that he was eventually recalled (fired) from his position
as Prefect (Roman Governor) of Judea, because his brutal repression of
the Judeans was itself causing too much resentment. I can't imagine that
Pilate would have given a damn about yet one more charismatic,
faith-healing preacher. Even Jesus' admission, "My Kingdom is not of
this world," would have offended him. The only kings were those to whom
Caesar and the Senate granted that title.

By the same token, Caiaphas (the chief Priest) comes off too
unsympathetically, and the story suffers his loss as a potential figure
for instruction. I have given my own more sympathetic interpretation
above. In Gibson's rendition, however, Caiaphas has about as much regard
for human life as the Taliban, and even threatens Pilate with stirring
up a rebellion if Pilate does not crucify Jesus.

Caiaphas and his
followers may have been the official priests of the Temple, but they had
been installed and maintained by Rome as useful collaborators, and
everyone knew it. Those with legimate claim to be priests — descendants
of Aaron and members of the tribe of Levi — had been suppressed, and
their line of descent had been obsured. In other words, Caiaphas and the
Judean religious-legal body called the Sanhedrin were in no position to
start a rebellion.

They were not even in a position to execute a man (although
stoning the occasional adulteress seemed to be okay). The Roman
occupation reserved that power for itself. That is to say, Jesus was
executed on Pilate's order.

By contrast, I almost weep for Peter's anguish at realizing
how he had betrayed Jesus by denying that he knew him. I feel the same
even for Judas, who in his mortal regret for having betrayed Jesus,
commits suicide before he could see the Resurrection, and seek the
Forgiveness that the Risen Christ would surely have granted him. Perhaps
these shadings of emotion are merely my projections, derived from my
prior meditations on the Crucifixion. Or perhaps they are reactions to
the shadings of portrayal in the cinematic art of Gibson and his cast.

May we legitimately ask of Gibson that he slant the portrayals
ever so slightly toward more modern sensibilities? After all, the
Gospels themselves are slanted toward the sensibilities of a Greco-Roman
audience (they were written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic) living in
the latter part of the first century, A.D. The Gospel writers whitewash
Pilate and tar Caiaphas, because you don't win converts and avoid
persecution by implicating your audience's favorite governing structures
in a crime against the God-Man for whom you seek to win their
conversion. But you must implicate some group — religion back then was
even more of a team sport than it is now — so why not some group who
wasn't able to defend itself, like the Judeans? And besides, the Judeans
were there, many of them must have called for, or at least assented to,
the Crucifixion, and just as most of them had successfully resisted
contamimation of their religion by the Romans, most of them also
resisted contamination of their traditional religion by the Jesus
movement, which must have engendered some animosity on the part of the
early Christians, both Roman and Judean.

[OK. I could call them "Jews," but the Judeans were divided
into about five religio-political factions, the Pharisees, the
Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Jesus movement. Of these,
the Pharisees evolved through the crucibles of the occupation and the
Diaspora, and their creative reaction to them — the Talmud — into modern
Judaism. The Jesus movement was absorbed by Greco-Roman culture and
became Christianity, which means that Christianity is, culturally
speaking, an extremely Hellenized branch of Judaism. The other factions
did not survive the Roman occupation. Besides, the Romans didn't call
them Jews, either. They called them Judeans, which is translated into
modern languages as "Jews."]

So, the Gospels are anti-Judean, or at least
anti-the-Judean-factions-that-were-not-the-Jesus-movement. Thus written,
they have lent themselves to later interpreters who were anti-Semitic,
which contributed to anti-Semitism becoming one of the Sins of the
Christian Church. Can we therefore ask that Gibson re-slant the story,
so that the Judeans appear more sympathetic, and the Romans less so?
Within limits, Gibson already does it. It is clear in the film
that many Judeans are in the Jesus movement. Several members of the
Sanhedrin itself challenge the legitimacy of Caiaphas' midnight "trial"
of Jesus, before they are ejected. But the limits are narrow.

The limits are set by mostly by the Gospel texts as we have
received them, collected, selected, and preserved for us by the Roman
Catholic Church. And with the exception of a few touches, Gibson stays
within them. Jesus and his Mother Mary, for example have few speaking
parts in the Passion narratives, and therefore, few speaking parts in
the film. Rather than fully developed characters, they are cinematic
icons. Jesus, is the innocent Lamb of God, who bears the Sins of the
World. Mary is the Mother is the embodiment of comfort and strength,
even as she herself bears the unbearable torment of witnessing her Son's
slow and brutal execution. Other than Christ, she alone seems to
understand what is happening and to accept its necessity.

The other limits on Gibson's film are set by the
extra-biblical traditions of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the
Passion. One of those extra-biblical traditions, perhaps one may serve
to illuminate Gibson's motivation.

As Jesus collapses yet again while bearing his Cross toward
Golgotha, a woman steps forward to wipe his bloody face with a cloth. In
Catholic tradition, she is only named for what she posesses, Veronica,
the True Image (of Christ). Again, I feel tears welling in my eyes. If
only the tradition were true, and if only the Veronica had not been
lost. I care not so much to look on an image of Christ, whether true or
not, but something in me yearns to touch, even to kiss, something that
had touched my Lord in kindness. I surprise myself that I am capable of
such piety.

Piety is obviously Gibson's motivation for making this film.
It is a thank-you card from Mel to his Redeemer, and to the Church that
instructed him in the Faith. Mel gave it everything he had, and stayed
as close as the film-maker's art would allow to the text and traditions
as given. His piety permits no slanting or softening to meet the demands
of modern sensibility. Nor is it needed. Rather, modern sensibility has
for too long been trying to forget its roots in the ancient faith. It
is modern sensibility that could stand to be less smug.

So, bottom line. Is "The Passion of the Christ" anti-Semitic?
As writer-producer-director, he had complete creative control over this
film. I was told that the hand he chose to show driving the nail into
Christ's hand is his own. (And until you can come to an understanding
that, spiritually speaking, the Blood of Christ is on your hands, too, you have yet to make a truly Christian confession.)
The Passion of the Christ (both the narratives in the Gospels,
and Mel Gibson's film) is a shock, a horror, and a scandal, but it is
also the beginning of the Good News. The completion is the moment of
Resurrection, with which the film ends.

If you are Christian, I recommend that you see "The Passion of
the Christ" for the opportunity to expose yourself to the emotional
impact of what it is you say you believe. If you are other than
Christian, this is an opportunity to find out what makes the Christians
with whom you share this world tick. There is very little "background"
in the movie, so you might want to read one or more of the Gospels
first. But don't bring the kids. It's rated R for a reason.

Editor's Note: After 2006, it appears that if you get Mel Gibson drunk, let him drive,
and then try to arrest him, he gets anti-Semitic Tourette's Syndrome.
The film may not be overtly anti-Semitic, but we're not so sure about
Mel.

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I'm a Christian and a retired weapons scientist, vocations which have sensitized me to some of the ways in which the world is dangerously insane. So, on 4 July 1996 I founded the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, which is moving to this blog.